A technology designed by Microsoft. Without OLE, if a user took a portion of a document that originated in a particular application, Word, for example, and attached it and sent it to another CPU, if that user did not have the same application, he/she could not launch the attachment and edit it in any way. OLE overcomes this by embedding OLE tools in the "attachment" and as long as the receiving application is OLE-compliant, the attachment can be launched by simply clicking on the fragment of the attachment appearing on the screen. In imaging, this means that the user may have both a scanned image and a Word document, for example. The Word document can be launched and edited by the receiver if there is OLE compliance in the system.
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